Happiness

Reinvention is difficult, happiness is harder.

That’s the trick of the gods. They made the one thing we want the most — the most difficult. Maybe AI will figure it out.

Unlikely, I think, as I kick the rock down the street.

I stand in the rain, drenched through.

I don’t care.

Maybe I’m a psycho.

Maybe you’re a psycho for reading this story.

All I knew was I didn’t like my life, not one bit.

But I did like her.

The only time my heart ever lit up, the only time my breath ever caught, was when I saw her.

But it could never work out between us.

I kick the rock.

Because she is a goth.

And I’m just a guy. I’m a do-nothing nineteen-year-old aspiring poet with a lot of feelings and not much else. But why have I never been fascinated by any other girls? I don’t know.

Before I met her, I thought I was dead. Or worse. And they say there aren’t worse things but I know there are. Because I’m a poet.

I forgot my umbrella today and that’s why I’m soaked. Walking home from the junior college.

My whole life I’ve been waiting for happiness.

Today, walking in the rain, drenched and cold and shivering but also tingling with a little bit of life, with a funny feeling in the back of my skull — the kind of feeling maybe a killer gets before he kills, or a President gets before he Presides — yeah, something like that came to me and I felt like for once in my life maybe I should try. Maybe I should just change everything.

Yes, for once in my life I had a vision.

And I needed it now.

I needed her.

*****

AI doesn’t have the answers and neither does my mom. Sometimes I think my mom is an AI, she kind of just repeats herself a lot, says the same old things.

It aggravates me and makes me feel like I’m dying inside, but there’s nothing I can really do about it.

She’s not cruel or vindictive or anything like that. You can’t really fault someone for being generic. These are poet problems and they’re solved by writing poems.

*****

She was sure shocked when I got home today and started packing up everything in my room and taking it to the trash.

“What are you doing, honey? You need to think this through.”

“I did.”

“When?”

She’d followed me out into the rain where I stood near the trash cans.

I turned to her, looked her in the eyes, and fire flashed. “You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting the same results.” I remembered that quote from a stupid motivational speaker who’d visited my high school once. I thought he was a generic mess of genericness with nothing real inside, an animated ugly doll, but maybe he was onto something.

“But why do you have to throw away your clothes?”

I figured I may as well rip off the bandaid now.

“I’m going goth.”

“Goth, no honey, that’s dark. You will not be goth.”

“You’ll like it.” I smiled.

“Okay,” she said. “But remember dinner is at 5 tonight.”

“How could I forget?”

And then she left.

*****

I worked through until dinner. I took down all the posters on my walls: Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, poetry quotes, random propaganda posters to remind myself to steer clear of propaganda. I crumpled them into wads. I took my book collection and piled it into a brown cardboard box to take down to the bookstore. I needed to clear my room out. I even put my desk on wheels and carted it out to the front of the house and put a sign on it that said: FREE.

My mom showed up outside again. “You can’t leave that in the rain, dear.” Then she suddenly realized what was happening. “Jakey, not the furniture too. Goths have furniture. You can’t get rid of everything.”

“Yes I can.”

She stood there, hands on her hips, stern.

“I have to restart,” I said.

“How are you going to replace your furniture? You don’t have any money. Your dad and I aren’t paying.”

“Just let me cook.”

“I already cooked dinner, honey.”

I walked back inside.

*****

Now I lay in my empty room, besides for the box of books. I have one pair of clothes, the one I’m wearing. That’s all. I have ten dollars to my name and a broke bicycle. I have access sometimes to my mom’s car. I have nothing. And I smile to myself. I feel like a psycho. But I feel free for the first time since I was a child.

I feel like I can be anything. I’m not limited. I’m not in high school anymore. I’m in junior college. But I’m quitting that too. I decide to be a service-business entrepreneur during the day. A goth during the night.

I don’t want to be who I was.

I want to be new.

I want to feel consequential.

Up until now, I’ve been coasting.

Now I’m accelerating, and I am the one who is pushing on the gas.

*****

I spend the next day fixing my bike. It’s still raining. I’m wearing the same pair of clothes. According to the weather, it’ll be sunny tomorrow, which means I can launch my new business. I need money to date Selena, to impress her, to take care of her. There it comes again: that psycho tingling in the back of my head. It’s that feeling the trending influencer girls get before they snap the picture of themselves skydiving. It’s the feeling the stupid lecturers get before they ply you with platitudes until their heart is content — and mine is shattered into a million billion pieces because I’ve never been motivated by the traditional things. I don’t care about money, power or prestige. I care about how I feel. I care about how others feel. I care about the inky, dark blackness of the night and streetlamps shedding dull little circles of light and black cats on warm, wet mornings and Ray Bradbury stories and Walt Disney dark forests and sneaking my mom’s wine into my bedroom at night while I write and stare at the lamp light. I like Halloween and pumpkins and the fact that we’re all going to die. Apparently, in this world, that’s not enough.

*****

It’s the next day and the sun is out and it’s warm but I feel crazy. Again I feel like a psycho and I want to jump into the nearest set of bushes as I stand before the house with the big windows. Suddenly I’m thirsty but my mouth is also watering. I’ve been wearing the same pair of clothes for the last three days. I want to throw myself onto the lawn of the stranger’s house and writhe and roll around. I hope the sprinklers come on. I want to die. That’s how nervous I am.

“You can do this,” I tell myself. “You can do this.”

I begin walking down the flagstone walk and every step feels like death and I’m the grim reaper but I’m not grim I’m just dead inside and alive and heavy and the world spins out of my purview and I feel like jello. I’m not real.

I knock on the door but the hand isn’t mine.

I ring three times but the bell sounds like it’s coming from another world.

A woman answers the door. She’s dressed nicely.

I feel ratty in my clothing.

I need new clothing.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” I say. And I choke on my words and I’m sweating and I’m shaking. “I’m a window washer.” And then I freeze. I can’t say more. I completely frozen. I feel like the man who is stricken by conscience before he commits murder. Or a man who is on the edge of the roof about to fall off and gets stricken with Jimmy Stewart-Esque VERTIGO!!!

I feel like tearing out my hair and screaming, and running naked headlong into a jungle filled with dead heads and skulls mounted on spikes and javelins crisscrossing so fast that you can’t see them but you can hear them, unlike the scorpions that lurk like deadly thoughts in dark corners and under the covers.

“How much do you charge?” she asks after a long pause.

But I’m stuck, and she sees it and I feel her compassion.

“The last crew did it for $500,” she said.

I gulp. I knew I needed to change. My whole life I’ve been soft. My whole life I’ve been the one on the backfoot. So I decide I’m going to charge her $600.

I open my mouth and I say, “I’ll do it for $450.”

“Okay. When should I expect you back?”

“Today,” I say.

I run back to my house (for this house is in the same neighborhood).

I grab a bucket and an old squeegee and some Dawn soap and a ladder. I truck the items all the way over there. No problem.

It takes me two hours.

The woman pays me in cash.

*****

I’m feeling good now, but approaching the next door is just as terrifying. I don’t feel so much like a psycho, though. I feel like a hobo, because I’m wet and dirty from cleaning the first house. I need new clothes. I need to wash more windows.

There is no one home.

I knock on more doors.

I get a few rejections, and they don’t hurt as bad as I would have thought. In fact, they give me a sense of boldness. Like, I can just do things. I can just ask for things.

I land another house.

I truck over the ladder.

I wash the windows.

This time I charge $500.

*****

By the time the day is over I do four houses.

I make over $2,000, because of tips.

I go home and eat dinner.

My parents ask me what I did today. I don’t answer. Can’t give away my dopamine. Need more. Have more work to do.

*****

Next morning I show up at the department stores early. I went to the outlet. I start with Levis, buy myself a great pair of 501s, a belt, and a stiff work shirt with a front pocket and clean pressed lines. Now I look professional. I throw away my other clothes in a trash can at the mall. I buy a few more pairs of work clothes. I spend $300. Then I go back to work.

*****

I do this for two weeks. Everyday all week.

I average $2,000 a day.

At the end of two weeks I make $23,000 dollars.

Along the way, I meet a kid, sixteen, who wants to wash windows and learn the ropes from me. I teach him how to do door-to-door sales and I give him some nice equipment that I purchase. He works for my company now. He makes half of any job he lands and performs.

Now, I take a week off to become goth while my employee continues making money. Maybe one day he’ll branch off and start his own business, but he seems too dull to figure out that he can just buy his own equipment. So I’m fine for now.

*****

Now, the real work begins.

Now I become goth.

I go to Hot Topic, I ask questions. I feel like a psycho again, but I feel the agency rising in me, higher and higher everyday, making me feel free. Making me feel like I can accomplish anything. I feel like an incredible psycho. Like a psycho who just got a head massage from an old Indian man who massages with hands that know two thousand years of secret head massaging knowledge. I ask plenty of questions (‘I pepper them with questions,’ my mom would say) and the goths in the store help me choose an outfit and makeup and they give me a list of things I’ll need to complete the gothing of myself, things like: an Xbox, collectible anime figures, Apple music and heavy metal heavy on the rotation, a Bible (these were Christian goths — they recommended gothic lettering KJV), and a bunch of other things.

I buy new furniture for my room, dark tones, lots of glass.

I buy new decor, new posters, heavy on the Tim Burton.

I not only buy an Xbox, I buy some of the old video game systems even though I’m not much of a gamer. The furniture will deliver soon.

Tomorrow, I’m going to ask out Selena.

Even now, lying on the floor in my room and staring at the ceiling, I feel like death. All the color drains from my face. My stomach is tight.

YOU CAN’T JUST WALK INTO THE STORE AND ASK HER OUT ARE YOU CRAZY? — my nervous system shouts at me. Like a crazed killer, it shouts and attacks me and hoists me up, hands and legs bound, to a pig spit. Like Han Solo. And I try to blow away the flames rising under me but they’re too hot. I’m scorched, like Dylan O’Brien.

Eventually, after tossing and turning for many hours, I fall asleep.

*****

In the morning, I pack the box of my old books into my mom’s car and my employee meets me in the front yard. He hands me three grand — my cut of the money for his last three days of work.

“Good work,” I say. I smack him on the butt and send him on his way. He tells me he skips school these days. He’s having too much fun making money. Good for him. School is for the good little monkeys and I’m a gorilla now. I’m a freakin’ fat monkey zipping through the trees like Tarzan if Tarzan were a monkey. I’m a monkey king. I’m a master of worlds, small, dark ones. Sad ones. These worlds rain all the time but the people adapt. And they read some good books by the light of oil lamps and stare out their rain-patterned glass windows (thick, clear glass) and dream some nice dreams. I’m good, better, best. I’m the Swiss Family Robinson in a world of swindling broken families with no last names that anyone remembers. No consequence. No treacherous accolades. No treasured prices paid. And then there’s me.

That’s what I tell myself.

But all of my work and reinvention has led me to this moment.

My hands are sweating as I drive.

*****

I pull up to the parking lot before the used bookstore. That’s where she works. I know her work schedule because I’m a psycho — and because they post the work schedule on the wall behind the register. Selena works today. My mouth is dry and I feel like I’ve been bitten by a snake and I feel like I am a snake, and I’m slithering through the hot, dry day like a little murderous snake about to devour a few rats in the broad daylight, but with shame. I’m a snake with a conscience. My goth clothes feel all wrong.

The black makeup on my nails doesn’t feel right.

Everything is black, literally, and bleak and wrong.

I get out of the car holding my box of books.

And that’s when I realize: I’m not ready.

There is one final thing left for me to do.

I throw the books back in the car.

*****

Wearing my goth outfit and makeup I go to the dealership and I buy the BMW racing motorcycle for twelve grand cash. No problem.

“You in the mafia?” the salesman asks when I hand over the cash.

“I killed someone this very morning,” I say out loud, tasting the words on my tongue. I can be anything. I am anything. I am me. I am free. I’m feeling good. “With a golden gun and a proximity mine,” I add. I’d been playing a lot of the 007 Nintendo 64 game.

*****

It takes me a few weeks to get my motorcycle license. I’d never ridden one in my life. I’m getting used to my goth fits. They feel like me now. I’m playing Donkey Kong Country 2 every night and listening to a metal death version of Stickerbrush Symphony. I secretly install a new sound system in my mom's car and blast the song over the speakers.

In fact, I buy an electric guitar.

They say it takes years to learn.

But I have something ‘they’ don’t have:

I just do things now.

I learn within a few weeks.

Now I shred.

*****

I get comfortable on the motorcycle. I start racing other racers. They invite me to meetups. I’m learning to go fast. I split lanes. I fly at dangerous speeds.

Every three days my employee comes by and gives me a couple grand.

I buy books on investing.

I have too much money.

I’m making more than both my parents combined, but still I don’t tell them.

*****

Finally, the day comes to ask out Selena.

I pull up to the bookstore on my motorcycle (I’d put the books in a bin on the back). I rev the motor just in front of the store, then I pop the motorcycle up onto the curb and park it on the concrete. Selena comes out, standing before me.

“Nice bike.”

“Thanks.” I remove my helmet. “We should go for a ride sometime.”

“That would make me happy,” she says.